He made the estimate during a conversation with Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht at the Cloudflare Connect 2026 conference in San Francisco.
Steinberger said the spending was funded by investors and added that not all of the work produced by that usage was useful. In the same session, he said users may not want to give an agent every permission. His proposed arrangement is to use another agent to authorize an agent’s actions, with the systems negotiating whether an action is needed and can remain within guardrails.
He also said that pull-request review benefits from seeing how a contributor moved from the initial problem to the proposed code change, rather than receiving only finished work. The report does not provide invoices, token volumes, model mix, workload breakdowns, or a comparable cost figure for OpenClaw users or other teams.
The source reports conference remarks and an estimate; it does not independently verify the $10 million figure.